Thursday, June 3

My Friend Steve

For the past few months, my friend Steven McEwan has taken to drawing. A lot. I've known him for years and, yeah, he'd doodle some funny stuff from time to time, but not like this. He's recently been taken over by this compulsive urge to make pictures. Sometimes he says he's been up half the night just drawing weird stuff.

I was motivated to make this post because of the above poster he made for Daniel's 21st birthday. It's so goddamn cool and weird and brilliant. Isn't that exactly how a poster for a friend's party should look? Fun as hell. You just know you're in for a good time. I've changed the phone number / email and removed the date on that image for privacy sake.

The bulk of Steve's obsessive output has been dedicated to drawing people on Facebook. He must be close to posting 100 different friends (or even people he doesn't know), just for the sake of it. I've been trying to convince him to start a blog so people can browse through his work but he's not got round to it yet.

Alongside the big, bold colour pictures, every so often a little line-art compilation goes up. This is normally a retrospective list of everyone he's drawn recently. Facebook being Facebook, everyone kinda half-knows everyone else and it's really fun to sit and look over who Steve has been compelled to portray.

Last month he also went through a celebrity phase. So, as well as the Chuckle Brothers, we've had David Cameron, Ironside, Ironman, that horrible Fritzl guy, Rab C Nesbitt, Fall frontman - Mark E Smith and John Locke from Lost.

Steve has been asking me all sorts of questions about different kinds of paint, where to get prints made, framing etc. We've also been talking about going to life-drawing classes (something I've been meaning to get back into for years now). He's taking it pretty seriously, which is fantastic.

I understand this might be a bit in-jokey, like it might not be as amazing if you don't know Steve or any of the folk in his work. It's crazy if you do though. Imagine if one of your friends, just someone you go to the cinema with or skateboard with or something, started drawing hundreds of pictures, just because they felt like it. It's a strange thing.

If Steve gets round to collecting everything together online, I'll post a link up here for sure. The best thing is, he's progressing really fast. His drawings are getting better, his subjects broader, his colours bolder. I'm totally hyped to see where he goes next.

EDIT: well whaddaya know? He's went and started a blog since I wrote this. Check it out here.